Every Harry Potter Movie, Ranked by Pulse24. The $7.7 Billion Franchise Restarts on HBO This Christmas, Already on Its Second Lockhart.

Rotten Tomatoes puts Deathly Hallows Part 1 at the bottom of the Harry Potter franchise and Deathly Hallows Part 2 at the top, a 19-point gap between two films drawn from the same book. That is a useful data point, not a ranking. The list below is Pulse24's own, built on direction, performances, atmosphere, and how well each film handles the part of the story it was handed, with critic and audience scores cited throughout as evidence rather than as the method.

The two Deathly Hallows films still bookend this list, worst and best, but for reasons beyond a Tomatometer score. Splitting one novel in two forced Part 1 into a structural role no other film in the series had to play: nearly two and a half hours of setup with almost none of the payoff, which lands in Part 2 instead. That is a real explanation for the 19-point critical-reception gap, not just a correlation.

That history is about to matter again. HBO's new Harry Potter series starts the story over from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone this Christmas, with a different cast, a slower season-by-book pace, and a decade of episodes still to make before it reaches the ending these eight films already told. Ranking the films now, before a new generation of viewers meets a new Harry Potter, is as much a baseline for comparison as it is a nostalgia trip.

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8. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Kenneth Branagh spends Chamber of Secrets playing the single most purely entertaining character in the early films, a vain, cowardly celebrity wizard who fails upward at every turn, and it says something about the rest of the movie that he is also the part people remember best. The film runs 161 minutes, the longest in the franchise, and holds an 82% Rotten Tomatoes score with an equal 82% audience score, respectable numbers that undersell how repetitive the structure feels next to the film before it.

Strip away Lockhart and the plot is Sorcerer's Stone again: a hidden threat beneath Hogwarts, a mystery solved through the library and detention, a climactic descent under the school to face it directly. Sorcerer's Stone got to introduce that shape for the first time. Chamber of Secrets runs it a second time at greater length, and the extra thirty minutes go mostly to a boy's diary that Harry keeps having conversations with rather than to anything the franchise had not already shown. Branagh's performance is the one genuinely original thing in the film. It is also the piece of this movie's history still making news two decades later, since his HBO successor was recast just last week.

7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

Imelda Staunton's Dolores Umbridge does not have a single magical power worth calling supernatural, and she is still the most purely hateable villain the franchise ever produced, more unsettling in her cardigans and kitten plates than anything wearing a mask. Order of the Phoenix compresses the longest novel in the series into 138 minutes, the second-shortest runtime of the eight, and holds a 78% Rotten Tomatoes score against an 81% audience score.

Something had to give to fit the longest book into nearly the shortest film, and what gave was the emotional groundwork the novel spends hundreds of pages building before Sirius Black's death and the Ministry of Magic battle. Both events survive the cut. Neither lands with the weight the book earns for them, not because the filmmaking is weak but because there simply was not enough runtime left to earn it properly. Umbridge is reason enough to watch it. The rest of the film is the longest book in the series being run through a compactor.

6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)

Splitting Deathly Hallows into two films gave Part 1 an unusual job: carry nearly the entire first half of the final book, largely three teenagers camping in a tent while a horcrux slowly poisons their friendship, without either the wide-eyed world-building that powered the early films or the climactic battle waiting in Part 2. It made roughly $972 million worldwide and holds the franchise's lowest critic score at 77%, though its audience score of 85% runs eight points higher, the widest gap in the franchise where audiences rated a film above critics.

The film isn't poorly made. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra shot some of the franchise's best-looking sequences here, including an animated retelling of "The Tale of the Three Brothers" that stands apart stylistically from everything else in the series. What it lacks is a real ending, because it was never meant to have one. Critics clearly felt that structural imbalance more than audiences did, and the eight-point gap between the two scores is some evidence they were reacting to different things: critics grading the film as a self-contained movie, audiences grading it as the first half of a story they already knew paid off.

5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

There are better-directed films later on this list, but none of them had as hard a world-building job as Sorcerer's Stone did. Chris Columbus had to turn a bestselling book's version of Hogwarts into a physical place convincing enough for seven more films to inherit without question: the Great Hall, Diagon Alley, the moving staircases, Quidditch, all built from nothing in a single movie. John Williams's score gave the world a musical identity so durable the franchise never seriously tried to replace it. The film made roughly $975 million in its original theatrical run and crossed $1 billion in lifetime worldwide gross after a 2020 re-release in China, one of only two films in the franchise confirmed to have reached that mark. It holds an 81% Rotten Tomatoes score.

That world-building achievement is also the film's limit. Columbus directs close to the book, sometimes too close, and the film's biggest set pieces, the troll in the bathroom, the chess match, the final confrontation with Quirrell, play more like illustrated chapters than cinema with its own rhythm. The later films could afford to take Hogwarts for granted precisely because Sorcerer's Stone did the unglamorous work of establishing it first.

4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Half-Blood Prince slows the series down on purpose, trading spectacle for teenage romance subplots and a slow-building sense of dread around Dumbledore's fate, and that choice has long made it divisive among fans. It made roughly $934 million worldwide on a reported $250 million budget and holds an 84% Rotten Tomatoes score against a 78% audience score, one of several films in the franchise where critics warmed to something audiences were more lukewarm on.

Michael Gambon's Dumbledore gets his best material in the franchise here, particularly in the cave scene forcing Harry to keep giving him a poison that is slowly killing him, played with a vulnerability the character rarely showed elsewhere. The tonal shift toward horror and grief in the film's final act, ending with Dumbledore's death and Hogwarts genuinely in mourning, set up the stakes the last two films needed and mostly earned them.

3. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

Goblet of Fire is the hinge point of the franchise, the film where Harry Potter stops being a children's story and starts being a horror-adjacent one, ending with a classmate's murder and Voldemort's physical return. It grossed roughly $896 million worldwide and holds an 88% Rotten Tomatoes score, the third-highest in the series, against a 74% audience score, the lowest audience number in the franchise and the widest critics-audience gap of any film on this list.

Some of that gap traces back to a single much-discussed choice: Michael Gambon's more physical, more temperamental take on Dumbledore, capped by a widely debated moment of fire-breathing fury after the Goblet names Harry a fourth champion, that struck a lot of book readers as a real break from Richard Harris's calmer performance in the first two films. Mike Newell directed the only entry in the franchise not helmed by Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, or David Yates, and the Triwizard Tournament sequences, the dragon chase, the underwater lake, the maze, remain some of the most purely thrilling setpieces the series ever built. Cedric Diggory's death is the franchise's point of no return. A student enters the maze expecting to win a school tournament and comes back dead in Harry's arms, and the films never fully return to the safety of the Columbus era after it.

2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Prisoner of Azkaban made roughly $796 million worldwide, the lowest total in the franchise, and holds a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score against an 86% audience score, both the second-highest of either kind in the series. That combination, lowest box office paired with a near-top critical and audience reception, coincides with the franchise's biggest directorial swing: Alfonso Cuarón replacing Chris Columbus.

Cuarón darkened the visual palette, aged the characters up, and treated the material with a formal ambition the earlier films had not attempted, the kind of instinct that would carry him to Children of Men and Gravity a few years later. The Buckbeak flight, the werewolf transformation, and the time-turner sequence all hold up as some of the most technically accomplished filmmaking in the franchise. Azkaban is where Harry Potter stops looking like an exceptionally expensive illustration of the books and starts behaving like cinema with a visual identity of its own, even though it made less money than every other entry.

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)

Deathly Hallows Part 2 closes the franchise with a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score and an 89% audience score, the highest of either kind in the series and the only film in the franchise that leads on both measures at once. It grossed roughly $1.34 billion worldwide in its original theatrical run, the largest single total the franchise ever produced.

The Battle of Hogwarts hands nearly the entire back half of the film over to near-continuous action, something the franchise had never attempted at that scale, without losing the character beats that made the series work in the first place: Snape's memories reframing seven films of assumptions about him, Neville Longbottom's transformation from comic relief to genuine hero, Harry's walk into the Forbidden Forest to die. It is one of the rare modern franchise finales that carried a decade of audience investment and enormous commercial stakes into its ending and actually delivered one, instead of just delivering more spectacle.

What's Next: HBO's Reboot

None of that history disappears when HBO's Harry Potter premieres Christmas Day 2026. It restarts it. Season 1 adapts Philosopher's Stone across eight episodes, with newcomers Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton, and Alastair Stout playing Harry, Hermione, and Ron, alongside John Lithgow as Dumbledore, Paapa Essiedu as Snape, Janet McTeer as McGonagall, and Nick Frost as Hagrid. Warner Bros. Discovery has described it as a decade-long project, one season per book, seven seasons in total, a format built for dramatically more screen time per story than any film version ever had.

The show has already generated its own news before a single episode has aired. Nicholas Hoult exited the role of Gilderoy Lockhart in late August after scheduling conflicts with two other projects made his participation impossible, and HBO recast the part within days, landing Kit Harington for Season 2. That kind of pre-premiere shakeup would have been a minor footnote for most shows and instead became a trending topic for one built on source material this scrutinized. Whether roughly eight hours per book can do more with the material than the films managed in two to three is the real question the show has to answer, starting this Christmas.

The Pulse24 Take

This is Pulse24's ranking, not Rotten Tomatoes', and the two mostly agree at the extremes for good reason. Deathly Hallows Part 2 tops both the critics' Tomatometer and the audience Popcornmeter, the only film in the franchise to lead on both at once, and that kind of alignment between critics and audiences is genuinely rare across an eight-film series adapted from books this beloved. Where we part ways with a pure critic-score ranking is in the middle of the list, where Chamber of Secrets outscores Deathly Hallows Part 1 on the Tomatometer but, in our view, has far less to say: it is Sorcerer's Stone's structure run a second time, while Part 1 is at least attempting something the franchise had not tried before, even if it does not fully land.

Prisoner of Azkaban's position near the top despite being the franchise's lowest earner is the more interesting story in the middle of this list. It is the clearest evidence that visual ambition and box office do not move together, and that critics and audiences alike rewarded Cuarón for taking risks the franchise's other directors did not. HBO's version gets to make that same choice eight times over, one book per season, with a decade to get each one right instead of a two-year turnaround between films. Whether that slower pace produces something as good as Part 2 at its best, or just a longer version of Chamber of Secrets at its most padded, is the actual bet Warner Bros. Discovery is making this Christmas.